CI system maintainability

[Harald Sitter]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 3:57 PM David Jarvie <djarvie at kde.org> wrote:
> I agree. Mandatory reviews might work if there is a team of active people working on a project, but if there is only one person with real knowledge of the code

We do have common ownership of code, so if there is only one person
with real knowledge of the code that is a problem in of itself... A
problem which really should get solved... For example by having
mandatory reviews so someone actually has to review code they know
just as little about as everyone else, so in turn they now know a bit
more and can more confidently do reviews ;)

Now to be sure, I am not certain mandatory reviews are in fact the
answer to the problem at hand, nor if they would in fact be possible
to implement reliable. From personal experience I'll say that reviews
almost always are worth it, even for the simple typo fixes. And I also
almost find someone to give at least a casual review even when they
know nothing of the code base. Sometimes perhaps even "I couldn't say
if this change is good, but the code looks correct at least +1" is
better than nobody having looked at the code at all. It ultimately
also becomes a matter of busfactor. If nobody ever has reason to look
at code with a single principal author the busfactor will never
improve.

HS